


real things

by atiredonnie



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Lesbians, Murder, This show ripped my heart into little bits, not to be epic but I am going to cry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:34:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22534813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atiredonnie/pseuds/atiredonnie
Summary: And I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday.
Relationships: Tara Maclay/Willow Rosenberg
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	real things

**Author's Note:**

> i finished buffy season six a few days ago and now i want to go commit write character introspection 
> 
> season six spoilers, obviously. and dead gay girls if that’s not your cup of tea.

Willow learns early on that real kisses were on and for the mouth. 

Cheek kisses, forehead kisses, kisses on the nose and hand and the tippy-top of a head we’re all fair game. But when she lurches forwards to kiss Xander on his mouth, bright red with kool-aid and blood from baby scrapes, he screeches and pries her off him and mom talks on the phone for an hour later that night with a pinched expression, an invisible hand crumpling her face up like pink and yellow construction paper. 

Willow is very smart. Teachers know and Xander knows and mom knows. She’s smart enough to know that the construction paper and kool aid and baby scrapes aren’t a part of the real world. No, the real world is the big black telephone like a beetle on its back, the tall fragile glasses that line the back of the cabinets, soldiers in their neatness and their ability to break. The real world is high-schoolers with their tall hair and golden midriffs and heavy books that smell like dirt and mothballs. All of that is real. All of that has weight.

And because Willow is very smart, it doesn’t take her long to catalogue kisses on the mouth as real things too. She keeps kisses on the cheek for the playground, and thinks about lips on lips, bits of rosey flesh biting at each other, flush in the dark, feeling very grown up.

Oz kisses her on the mouth. Xander, too, and wasn’t that a mistake. The two of them don’t care for cheeks or heads or hands. Which is fine, because Willow wants old things, big things, grand things, and kisses on the mouth are for grown-ups and lovers. She is a grown up, and she is in love. And then she stops kissing for a while, because love goes wild with werewolf lust and drives off to Cambodia. And that’s the end of that.

When Tara kisses her on the cheek, time stops and starts and then stutters like a vinyl on a cheese grater. A cheek kiss, a hand kiss, here and there, for friends. 

Then Willow leans into Tara’s chest with her legs slotted in the spots where Tara isn’t, skin dripping on skin with sweat and magic and joy, a trail of electricity dragging itself between them like a line of yellow paint dipped in a live wire, breathing the same air and gasping in tilted necks and clinging to pajamas and prayer beads and loose strands of hair as if they’re anchors that can somehow pull either of them away from impeding lesbianism. 

Cheek kisses aren’t for children after that. Cheek kisses are for grown ups, with their pearly teeth and big doe eyes and patterned skirts and nails with little moons painted on them. Tara kisses Willow’s face, every inch of it, her closed eyelids and the curve of her forehead and the slope of her chin, and her hands, too, each fingernail and hard spot where the bone of the joint meets skin. Kisses her through fabric and through space, distance coiling inwards like a slinky until all of it’s trapped between two bodies. Foreheads tipped together. Hair kissing skin.

Tara tells Willow she likes her face, because it can make pretty smiles and roll eyes and conduct power like a pot bubbling over. Tara tells Willow she likes her hands because they do work worth doing. Tara says she likes her eyes. Her chest. Her waist. Her wrists.

Willow strides through the dark. Tara liked her eyes. Black now. Tara liked her hair. Black now. Tara liked her hands. Aching for blood now. 

Spread out like that, Warren looks almost like Christ on the cross.

Willow twitches and every inch of skin peels off of Warren’s internal, infernal meat. His lips stay, gasping for air and of pain for a second before stilling, two inanimate slabs of flesh decorating a bag of blood and bones. 

Willow twitches again and watches the boy flame up.

Once upon a time someone had kissed Willow like she meant something. Someone had been looking at her like she meant something when two ounces of smoking metal punched through that someone’s left ventricle and left a neat little hole in her shirt. Someone had fallen and died and would never look at or kiss anything ever again.

So Willow kills Warren. Forgiveness her ass.

When she folds into Xander’s chest like a broken beach chair, she will remember the smell of the burning, and the little stars that Tara wore in her ears.


End file.
